After watching this episode of Threadbanger, I decided I needed to make some homemade lip balm. I bought all of the necessities, bees wax, lip balm tubes, scented oil, the works. That was a few months ago. I finally decided to get off my rump and make some balm!

This post is all about coconuts. A single coconut has multiple uses, and I'm going to show you just a few of them. Okay, I lied. I'm not going to talk about 101 different ways to use the same coconut.. I'm going to talk about four or five different ways. That's still a lot!
The first use! Coconut oil. Here's a bunch of pictures of when my mom taught me how to make coconut oil.

I apologize in advance for the not so great pictures.

Blurry picture of her cracking that sucker open. She was moving pretty fast.

Mmm, this is a good coconut. Lots of meat.

You use this contraption, my mom called it a kudkuran, to scrape the meat out. You sit on it with the skarp part stickin out between your legs.

Super bad picture, but the only one I have of me scraping the meat out.

After a little bit of scraping, here's what it looks like.

Here's a before and after. I went a little crazy on that half, you're not supposed to see that much brown.

All used up.

Time to start getting that milk out of this meat! Here we have a fine strainer, a bowl and the coconut meat.

Here she put in some water and started mushing it all around.

Take a handful and squeeze it over the bowl.

Here's some of the milk she squeezed out. After you have it all squeezed out, you can repeat the process again to get a little bit more milk. You'd have to be careful with the water though so it isn't watered down too much.

Strain the milk into a pan.

You can still squeeze a little bit of the milk out of this.

Crank that heat up!

Let it boil. And constantly stir.

Eventually it'll start to separate.

More separation. The clear liquid is the oil... but wait, we can get more out of it!

Almost done. Let those little bits get all brown and toasted.

All done!

Strain it all! Save those little bits. You can use them as a topper for ice cream.. or cakes.. or something. You might want to toss it with a little bit of sugar though.

Further straining with a coffee filter.

Here's the oil! Yup. A whole coconut made this tiny bit of oil. You can use the oil for cooking or you can use it to make home made cosmetics.

Second use! As I mentioned in the pictures, you can save the little toasted bits and use them as a topping.

Third use! The meat that you extracted all that milk from is still useful. If you like toasted coconut, you can probably spread out the meat in a thin layer and throw it in the oven for a while.. You'd probably have to toss it with sugar though. (I haven't actually done this, but theoretically it should work, haha)

Fourth use! A Philippine snack: Budbud (the "o"s are long. Like Boo! and then a d at the end.... I dunno, it's hard to explain) also known as sweet rice. Mm, a delicious dessert.

Here's a recipe for budbud: Budbud recipe. You can use the original coconut milk you extracted to make this.. or, if you made coconut oil with the original milk, you can extract milk from the meat more than once. To eat, you unwrap the banana leaf, dip the rice in sugar, or, like in that picture, dip it in coffee and eat it that way. Either way is awesome.

Fifth use! If you wanted to, with one of the shells, you could clean out the remaining meat and dremel a hole in the side and have a sweet hermit home. Either that or dremel some small holes on either side of each shell half and make a islander bikini top!

Like this!

So those are just a few ways to put a coconut to use. I'll admit, with the budbud recipe, it calls for more than one coconut, but hey, you can make more oil and toasted bits and whatnot!